Garth Williams

‘Flow’, MGM Cotai

Role: Freelance Creative Director / Artist - concept, design, direction, execution

An immersive, physically based art experience that circumnavigates a massive public space (96,000 sq ft.) An asymmetric array of displays, some as large as 60 feet, act as canvas for this synchronized fluid event. I collaborated with and directed a diverse multidisciplinary team - DP, technologists, art direction, post production, fabrication, etc.

Dallas Cowboys AT&T Stadium Fan Experience

Role: Creative Director OBSCURA (now MSG) - concept, strategy, XD

The Cowboys Stadium fan experience empowers fans with a groundbreaking new platform that enables them to amplify their collective spirit to unprecedented levels. At the center of the experience is the interaction between mobile devices and a one hundred thirty foot, robotic, high resolution display, equipped with high powered strobe lights.

RiyadH ‘Mukaab’ Sky Scraper Cube

Role: Freelance - concept development, XD

Worked with a multidisciplinary team as a concept / UX contributor for interior experience journey of the futuristic city within the proposed 400m cube to be built in Riyadh.

‘Emergence’ Sf Exploratorium

Role: Creative Director OBSCURA (now MSG) - concept, design, execution

To celebrate the grand opening of the SF Exploratorium, natural phenomena were exposed through unique experiments, captured on camera and then projected on the facade of the new building. The experiments were carried out in carefully designed, miniature replicas of the the building, resulting in a total integration of phenomena with architectural form. No computer graphics were employed to create the experience.

‘Macro Me’ Cal Academy of Sciences

Role: Director of Innovation Academy of Sciences - concept development, strategy, design

MacroMe is a photography based, guest photo experience that leverages the Academy’s vast collection of 55 million specimens and the high end digitization lab they use to capture them. Through facial recognition and cloud compositing, the Academy’s digitization libraries transform visitors into one-of-a-kind fantastical beings, melding their features with lifeforms of their choosing.

My role as Director of Innovation at the Academy gave me the autonomy to identify overlapping opportunity areas and to develop actionable strategies and concepts that connect, extend, educate and if possible monetize guest engagement.

‘Mobile Delight’ Cal Academy of sciences

Role: Director of Innovation Academy of Sciences - concept, strategy, design

An internal initiative focused on the development of an omnipresent ‘meta-layer’ of content and interaction that connects guests with knowledge in new and meaningful ways throughout the Academy.

Americas Cup - Flying on Water Exhibit

Role: Creative Director OBSCURA (now MSG) - concept, XD

“Flying on Water” gave visitors to the Americas Cup Pavilion the ability to palpably experience the phenomena that make sailing possible. “Bernoulli’s Principle” and other concepts were made interactive through the union of real wind and water, physical computing and projection mapping.

‘Aquam Circulus’ Terrarium Prototype

Role: Independent - concept, design, technology, construction

A computer controlled, self watering hydroponic terrarium that features a unique rain making system. It rains four times per day, recycling the same 20 gallons for approximately 6 months of maintenance free operation. Inhabiting the terrarium are a variety of rare, delicate, high altitude plants.

‘Zhro’ Mindwave Art prototype

Role: Independent - conceptual, design, physical computing, development (c, python), data visualization

Conceived, designed and built this art prototype that incorporates EEG headset, LEDs, piezo sensors, stepper motor, Raspberry PI, Arduino, Bluetooth, WiFi, Python data visualization, a thermal receipt printer, etc.

An Ouija / Dartboard hybrid. Brainwaves rotate the board. The rotational value corresponds to letters of the alphabet. When a dart impacts the board a letter is captured. Letters are compared to an index of all words in the English language. If there’s a match, captured brain data is visualized and the word is printed on a paper receipt. Actually, there’s a lot more to it than that, but in a nutshell...

Genentech ‘MIRROMID’

Role: Creative Director OBSCURA (now MSG) - concept, XD

The Mirromid is a futuristic, immersive installation created for Genentech that let's one experience how medicine works inside of the body. The interior of the pyramidal structure is completely mirrored except for the rear wall, which is composed of a grid of twenty two 47" thin bezel monitors. The experience was deigned with symmetry in mind. Being inside the Mirromid is very much like begin inside of massive video kaleidoscope. Through gestural control the user interacts with cells inside of the body, releasing antibodies to destroy cancerous cells.

Golden State Warriors - SF Arena

Role: Creative Director OBSCURA (now MSG) - concept development, strategy, client workshop facilitation

Led a design team that spent several months identifying opportunity areas, generating concepts and designing experiences for the new Golden State Warriors Arena. The project included interviews, workshops, brainstorms and share-backs with a spectrum of arena stakeholders. Our collaborations led to a playbook of actionable concepts regarding responsive architecture, unconventional display formats, fan engagement, novelty, utility, retail and more.

US Intelligence Black projects

Role: Senior Designer IDEO - concept, UX

Project 1: Over the course of this twelve month engagement our team tackled conceptual, tactical, interactive and cultural challenges regarding the consumption and sense-making of unprecedented amounts of information within one of the most elite branches of the US Directorate of Intelligence.

Project 2: A three month concept/design initiative focusing on the capture, sense-making and sharing of knowledge.

US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Senior Designer IDEO - concept, UX

The "CFPB" is an independent agency of the US government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector. Over approximately one year, our five person team created the complete consumer facing experience of the Bureau (concepts, branding, information and UX design). In my role as senior UX designer I collaborated with the team in every phase of the design process - user research, ideation, prototyping and testing. My unique contributions were concept development, prototyping and Interaction Design.

US Social Security Administration

Senior Designer IDEO - UX, IxD

Redesigning the US Social Security site was an incredible challenge In streamlining a tremendous amount of information for the broadest user groups, the American public. My contribution to this project was to do a preliminary UX audit of the site - identifying redundancy, weighing relevance and taking a first stab at simplifying the overall design. From there, the core team used my audit as a starting point for the long road to a final design.

Chase Bank - Future vison of digital banking

Role: Senior Designer IDEO - concept development, UX

Over a three month engagement our team explored human behaviors around money by talking to a spectrum of real people, each with a wide variety of needs and challenges. Based on insights gained we rethought and redesigned the digital banking experience in support of our findings.

‘Rabble’ Card Game

Role: Freelance - branding, design, packaging

I worked with a small startup as principle designer to brand and reboot this clever card/word game from the past.

Avatar 'Pandora Rovr' Microsite

Role: Senior Creative AKQA - concept , art / technical direction , UX

James Cameron's Avatar takes place on Pandora, an exotic and dangerous moon teeming with biodiversity. In the spirit of the Mars Rover, we placed a rover of our own on Pandora, allowing the public to explore and document this amazing world. To achieve this we created a virtual acre of Pandora from hundreds of original 3D assets used to make the film and connected this to a web based front-end. The signature interaction of the experience is that users can photograph anything from any angle. When a photo is taken the coordinates are sent to a render farm, which creates a one-of-a-kind high resolution image on demand.

Avatar McDonald's 'Big Mac Thrill Card' AR

Role: Senior Creative AKQA - concept development , UX, technical direction

For the launch of James Cameron's Avatar, Big Mac boxes worldwide featured a "Thrill Card" which triggers one of three, Avatar augmented reality experiences.

Xbox 'Halo Believe' Microsite

Role: Senior Creative AKQA - concept development

The Believe Microsite features a real life diorama measuring over 1,200 square feet. A video fly-through was made of this incredibly intricate model and turned into a large, navigable web experience with numerous content rich waypoints throughout.

Xbox 'Mass Effect' Microsite

Role: Senior Creative AKQA - concept development, graphic, motion, sound design

Mass Effect is a game with a story arc that traverses all corners of the universe. For the web experience we created a graphically/aurally rich, animated 3D cosmic exploration experience, allowing users to whiz from galaxy to galaxy to explore content.

Xbox 'Gears of WaR Microsite & ARG

Role: Senior Creative AKQA - creative, UX , technical consultant

This experience captured the war-torn world of Gears of War by creating a deeply immersive web environment created from the actual game engine (Unreal 3). Content in this environment was unlocked by a global treasure hunt of lost soldier’s dog tags hidden in the real world. Each tag had a unique code that unlocked content in the environment. People who were lucky enough to find a tag were credited in the site for the content they unlocked.

Xbox 360 Global Launch Microsite

Role: Senior Developer - concept development, creative development lead, motion & sound design

For the global launch of the Xbox 360, our team created a fun and immersive way to explore its upcoming titles and features through a series of games, interactive sounds and content controlled by the user in an immersive 3D environment.

Nike 'Airmax360' Microsite

Role: Senior Creative Developer AKQA

An interactive CG video microsite that allows the viewer to seamlessly explore the Airmax360 shoe from unprecedented vantage points - inside/out, micro/macro.